Fuel injection is well known in the art for injecting fuel into a combustion chamber of an engine that is subsequently mixed with air or oxygen and then combusted for powering the engine. Fuel injectors receive fuel from the fuel system of an engine that is frequently cleaned or filtered so that debris, dirt, particulates and other contaminants have been removed. However, sometimes the prefiltering of the fuel is unsuccessful in filtering out enough contaminants before reaching the fuel injector. Such contaminants then may undesirably foul the workings of the fuel injector. As a result, the performance of the fuel injector may be adversely affected and the fuel injector may stop working altogether in some instances.
One solution to this problem is to place a fuel inlet filter at the place where fuel enters the fuel injector, helping to remove any contaminants present in the fuel before it enters into the fuel injector. However, sometimes the fuel inlet is in an area where two components of the fuel injector assembly meet. For example, this junction may occur where the nozzle assembly (sometimes referred to as the case or nozzle housing) is screwed onto the body assembly (sometimes referred to as the body or the main housing) of the fuel injector. In such applications, there may be a dimensional variance between portions of the case and body since there is no tight control of this dimension. Instead, the case is tightened onto the body via threads until a predetermined torque threshold is reached, at which time, the relative movement of the case to the body ceases. As a result, a filter placed between case and body may either be overly compressed or crushed, or slop may be provided that allows fluid to bypass the filter. In either scenario, the intended purpose of providing a sufficient amount of filtered fuel is defeated.